"He's having nightmares," Cathy said. It wasn't a lie, but what followed was. "Something about a helicopter, and Buck somebody ... I can't ask him about it, but-"

Murray cut her off. "Cathy, I can't talk about it over the phone. That's a business matter, kid."

"Really?"

"Really, Cathy. It's something I know about, but I cannot discuss it with you. I'm sorry, but that's the way it has to be. It's business."

Cathy went on with a touch of alarm in her voice. "It's not something that's happening now-I mean-"

"It's way in the past, Cathy. That's all I can say. If you think Jack needs professional help, then I can make a few calls and-"

"No, I don't think so. It was really bad a few months ago, but it does seem to be getting better. I was just worried that it might be something at the office...."

"All behind him, Cathy. Honest."

"You sure, Dan?"

"Positive. I would not kid around on something like this."

And that, Cathy knew, was that. Dan was every bit as honest as Jack was. "Thanks, Dan. Thanks a lot," she said in her best medical voice, the one that revealed nothing at all.

"Anytime, Cathy." By the time he hung up, Murray wondered if he'd just been had in some way. No, he decided, there was no way she could have found out about that.

Had he seen the other end of the disconnected phone line, he would have been surprised to discover how wrong he was. Cathy sat alone in the kitchen, crying one last time. She'd had to check, there had not been a choice to purge all the emotions from her soul, but now she was completely certain that Clark had spoken the truth; that someone was trying to hurt her husband, that whoever it was was willing to use his wife and his family against him. Who could ever hate a man so much that they would try that? Who could ever hate a man so much that they would try that? she wondered. she wondered.

Whoever it was was her enemy. Whoever it was had attacked her and her family just as coldly as those terrorists had done, but much more cravenly.

Whoever it was would pay for that.

"Where have you been?"

"Sorry, doc. I had some errands to run." Clark had come back through the S&T office. "Here."

"What's this?" Ryan took the bottle. It was an expensive container of Chivas Regal in a ceramic bottle. The sort you couldn't see through.

"That's our transceiver. They made up four of them. Nice job, isn't it? Here's the pickup." Clark handed over a green stick, almost the thickness of a c.o.c.ktail straw, but not quite. "It'll look like a plastic doodad to hold the flowers in place. We decided to use three of them. The techies say they can multiplex the outbound transmissions, and for some reason or other they can crunch the computer time down to one-to-one. They also say that if we had another few months to play with the comm links, we could almost real-time the whole thing."

"What we have is enough," Jack said. Here and now "almost" was better than perfect too late. "I've funded enough research projects."

"I agree. What about the test flights?"

"Tomorrow, ten o'clock."

"Super." Clark stood. "Hey, doc, how about you call it a day? You look wasted."

"I think you're right. Give me another hour and I'm out of here."

"Fair enough."

Russell met them at Atlanta. They'd come across through Mexico City, thence through Miami, where the customs people were very interested in drugs, but not particularly interested in Greek businessmen who opened their bags without being asked. Russell, who was now Robert Friend of Roggen, Colorado-with the driver's license to prove it-shook hands with both of them and helped to collect their baggage.

"Weapons?" Qati asked.

"Not here, man. I have everything you need at home."

"Any problems?"

"Not one." Russell was silent for a moment. "Maybe there is one."

"What?" Ghosn asked with concealed alarm. Being on foreign soil always made him nervous, and this was his first trip to America.

"Cold as h.e.l.l where we're going, guys. You might want to get some decent coats."

"That can wait," the Commander decided. He was feeling very bad now. The latest batch of chemotherapy had denied him food for nearly two days, and as much as he craved nourishment, his stomach rebelled at the mere sight of it in one of the airport fast-food stands. "What about our flight?"

"Hour and a half. How about you get some sweaters, okay? Follow me. I'm not foolin' about the weather. It's like zero where we're going."

"Zero? That is not so-" Ghosn stopped. "You mean below zero, centigrade?"

Russell stopped for a second. "Oh. Yeah, that's right. Zero here means something different. Zero's cold, guys, okay?"

"As you say," Qati agreed. Half an hour later they had thick woolen sweaters to go under their thin raincoats. The mostly empty Delta flight to Denver left on time. Three hours later they walked off their last jetway for a while. Ghosn had never seen so much snow in his life.

"I can hardly breathe," Qati said.

"It'll take you a day to get used to the alt.i.tude. You guys go get the luggage. I'll get the car and warm it up for you."

"If he's betrayed us," Qati said as Russell walked away, "we'll know it in the next few minutes."

"He has not," Ghosn replied. "He is a strange man, but a faithful one."

"He is an infidel, a pagan."

"That is true, but he also listened to an imam in my presence. At least he was polite. I tell you, he is faithful."

"We will see," Qati said, walking tiredly and breathlessly to the baggage-claim level. Both men looked around as they moved, searching for eyes. That was always the giveaway, the eyes that fixed on you. It was hard even for the most professional of men to keep from looking at their targets.

They collected their luggage without incident, and Marvin was waiting. He could not stop the blast of air from hitting them, and thin as the air was, it was also colder than either had ever experienced. The heat of the car was welcome indeed.

"How go the preparations?"

"Everything is on schedule, Commander," Russell said. He drove off. The Arabs were quietly impressed by the vast open s.p.a.ce, the broad interstate highway-they found the speed-limit signs very strange-and the obvious wealth in the area. They were also impressed with Russell, who had manifestly done quite well. Both men rested easier that he had not betrayed them. It was not that Qati had actually expected it, rather that he knew that his vulnerability increased as they got closer to the final part of the plan. That, he knew, was normal.

The farm was of a good size. Russell had thoughtfully overheated it somewhat, but what Qati noted most of all was its obvious defensibility, with a clear field of fire in all directions. He got them inside and carried the bags for them.

"You guys have to be pretty tired," Marvin observed. "Why don't you just bed down? You're safe here, okay?" Qati took the advice. Ghosn did not. He and Russell went to the kitchen. Ibrahim was happy to learn that Marvin was a skilled cook.

"What is this meat?"

"Venison-deer meat. I know you can't eat pork, but you got any problems with deer?" the American asked.

Ghosn shook his head. "No, but I have never had it."

"It's okay, I promise. I found this at a local store this morning. Native-American soul food, man. This is good mule deer. There's a game-rancher around here who grows them commercially. I can try you out on beefalo, too."

"What the devil is that?" "Beefalo? Another thing you can only get around here. It's a cross between beef cattle and buffalo. Buffalo is what my people used to eat, man, biggest d.a.m.ned cow you're ever gonna see!" Russell grinned. "Good lean meat, healthy and everything. But venison's the best, Ibrahim."

"You must not call me that," Ghosn said tiredly. It had been a twenty-seven-hour day for him, counting the time zones.

"I got the IDs for you and the Commander." Russell pulled the envelopes from a drawer and tossed them on the table. "Names are exactly what you wanted, see? We just have to do the photos and put them on the cards. I have the equipment to do it."

"Was this hard to get?"

Marvin laughed. "Naw, it's standard commercial stuff. I used my own license form as a master, ginned up the copies, then I got the hardware to do first-cla.s.s dupes. Lots of companies use photo-pa.s.ses, and the equipment is standardized. Three hours' work. I figure we have all day tomorrow and day after to go over everything."

"Excellent, Marvin."

"You want a drink?"

"Alcohol, you mean?"

"Hey, man, I saw you have a beer with that German guy- what was his name?"

"Herr Fromm, you mean."

"Come on, it's not as bad as eatin' pork, is it?"

"Thank you, but I will pa.s.s on that-is that how you say it?"

"'Pa.s.s on the drink'?-yeah, that's fine, man. How's that Fromm guy doing?" Marvin asked casually, looking at the meat. It was almost done.

"Doing well," Ghosn answered just as casually. "He went off to see his wife."

"Exactly what were you guys working on, anyway?" Russell poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel's.

"He helped us with the explosives, some special tricks, you see. He's an expert in the field."

"Great."

It was the first hopeful sign in a few days, maybe a few weeks, Ryan thought. Dinner was fine, all the better to make it home in time to have it with the kids. Cathy had evidently gotten home from work at a reasonable hour and had taken the time to fix a good one. Best of all, they'd talked over dinner, not about very much, but they'd talked. Afterwards Jack had helped her clean up. Finally the kids went off to bed, and they were alone.

"I'm sorry I snapped at you," Cathy said.

"It's okay, I guess I deserved it." Ryan was willing to say almost anything to calm things down.

"No, I was wrong, Jack. I was feeling b.i.t.c.hy, and I had cramps, and my back hurt. What's wrong with you is that you're working too hard and drinking too much." She came over to kiss him. "Smoking, Jack?"

He was amazed. He hadn't expected to be kissed. More than that, he expected an explosion if she discovered that he'd smoked. "Sorry, babe. Bad day at the office. I wimped."

Cathy held his hands. "Jack, I want you to cut back on the drinking, and get your rest. That's your problem, that and the stress. We'll worry about the smoking later, just so you don't smoke around the kids. I haven't been very sympathetic, and I've been a little wrong myself, but you have to clean up your act. What you've been doing is bad for you, and bad for us."

"I know."

"Go to bed. You need sleep more than anything else."

Being married to a physician had its drawbacks. Chief among those was that you couldn't argue with one. Jack kissed her on the cheek and did as he was told.

30.

EAST ROOM.

Clark arrived at the house at the proper time and had to do something unusual. He waited. After a couple of minutes he was ready to knock on the door, but then it opened. Dr. Ryan (male) came out partway, then stopped and turned to kiss Dr. Ryan (female), who watched him walk off, and, after his back was fully turned, fired off a beaming smile at the car.

All right! Clark thought. Maybe he did have a new career set up. Jack also looked fairly decent, and Clark told him so as soon as he got in the car. Clark thought. Maybe he did have a new career set up. Jack also looked fairly decent, and Clark told him so as soon as he got in the car.

"Yeah, well, I got sent to bed early." Jack chuckled, tossing his paper on the front seat. "Forgot to have a drink, too."

"Couple more days like that and you just might be human again."

"Maybe you're right." But he still lit up a cigarette, somewhat to Clark's annoyance. Then he realized just how smart Caroline Ryan was. One thing at a time. d.a.m.n, Clark told himself, that is some broad.

"I'm set up for the test flight. Ten o'clock."

"Good. It is nice to put you to some real work, John. Playing SPO must be boring as h.e.l.l," Ryan said, opening the dispatch box.

"It has its moments, sir," Clark replied, pulling onto Falcon's Nest Road. It was another quiet day on the dispatches, and soon Ryan had his head buried in the morning Post.

Three hours later, Clark and Chavez arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. A pair of VC-20Bs had already been scheduled for routine training flights. The pilots and crews of the 89th Military Airlift-"The President's"-Wing had a strict regimen for maintaining proficiency. The two aircraft took off a few minutes apart and headed east to perform various familiarization maneuvers to acquaint two new copilots with air-traffic control procedures-which the drivers already knew backwards and forwards, of course, but that was beside the point.

In the back, an Air Force technical sergeant was doing his own training, playing with the sophisticated communications equipment that the plane carried. He occasionally looked aft to see that civilian, whoever the h.e.l.l he was, talking into a flower pot, or just into a little green stick. There are some things, the sergeant thought, that a guy just isn't supposed to understand. He was entirely correct.